Tuesday, 5 January 2016

Welcome to the world of Astronomydrawings

Hello all!

Since the dawn of civilisation man has been overthrown by the beauty of the heavens. There is no culture in which the stars were not admired, studied or even endowed with magical, if not divine powers. These days on the other hand there seems to be an evolution towards disinterest. Apart from a minority called “nerds” or “weirdoes” nobody still looks up at the nightly sky anymore. Of course, useless public lights have reduced the incredible spectacle of millions of stars to a mere shadow of what it once was, apart from an ever smaller part of extremely remote or uninhabitable areas.The sky’s usually no longer pitch-black but a dirty kind of orangy-grey and obviously a lot less attractive to look at. But still one could be surprised at how much there really is to see and discover up there. Just take out a cosy camper bed and make yourself comfortable in your garden or terrace, preferably when the sky’s really transparent and when there’s no moon around. And then... just look up and let yourself be swept away by what you see. There’s no better way to put things into perspective and make you feel humble, yes, even insignificantly tiny in the middle of the seemingly infinite vastness of the universe. Or grateful for the universe’s magnificence. And once you’ve really become enchanted, you may even want to take up astronomy too and become a member of the “weirdo-club”, spending entire nights behind your telescope in the freezing cold.

Well, let’s not take it that far yet and start from the beginning. There's an infinite amount of books, websites and forums about astronomy. You've probably already been bewildered many times by the most stunning photographs of the universe and my sketches could never compete with those because I can only draw what I've seen with my tiny little human eyes. Without even considering my limited artistical skills through which I try to give you an idea of what it really was that I saw. But perhaps that's exactly why my blog, and the blogs and websites of my sketching friends, are so unique. You won't find any images here which are the fruit of many hours of exposure time and digital editing necessary to make those pictures so stunning. My drawings are merely the result of often hours behind the telescope and afterwards a lot of photoshopping to render them as realistic as possible. What you see on my drawings, you will likely also see through the eyepiece of a similar telescope or binoculars.

It is my intention with this blog not just to show you my work, but also to tell you something about the object I sketched and from time to time I will also reveal some of my little sketching secrets. So I'd like to wish you, dear visitor, a lot of fun browsing through my posts. Hopefully, you’ll find them inspirational.